Creating Covers

Today I spent three hours at a friend’s house learning how to use Photoshop. Well, let’s be honest. He showed me how to use the program, but I’m still at the lowest level of the learning curve. Dave has had a book on photography published and has taught at the university level, whereas I took one class in photography at Sacramento State back several decades ago. Let’s say Dave was not overly impressed with the pictures I brought for this project.

Dave is a very patient man, and with his help, two covers were created. I loved being able to play with an idea, to try it different ways, delete what I didn’t like, and modify what I did like. I’m looking forward to trying the next cover on my own, but I have a feeling the process won’t go as smoothly without Dave sitting next to me.

If anything, today simply emphasized for me how much of what the publisher used to do is now the writer’s responsibility. If I want to take my previously published romances (which I have the rights to) and turn them into e-books, I have to do the formatting, create the covers, come up with enticing blurbs, figure out what tags will draw readers to the books, and then spend hours publicizing the fact that the books are available.

Of course, there is a positive side to this process: I will make more than 6% of the cover price.

That is, if I sell any.

By the way, now that I’ve created a new cover for AS THE CROW FLIES (I couldn’t use the one on the Five Star/Gale/Cengage edition without paying the artist, and he wanted too much money), I can now make it available as an e-book. So what do you think of this cover?

Word of warning, Lynda. Photoshop is not an easy program. But Dave told me there’s a web site called Lynda.com where for a small fee you can watch demos for a variety of computer programs. I’m going to check into that. (The Photoshop for Dummy’s book was no help at all.)

My daughter also gave me GIMP. I looked at it and was as baffled as I was with Photoshop. I do think you can create great covers with GIMP, but as you said, it takes time to learn the program. (More time away from writing.)